Starsuckers

Starsuckers arrives at precisely the moment when the influencer horror movie risks becoming as overpopulated as the zombie film once was. Fortunately, Canadian filmmakers Brett M. Butler and Jason G. Butler are less interested in warning us that social media is bad than in asking a nastier question: what happens when the people manufacturing celebrity and the people consuming it become equally desperate? Their 86-minute horror-comedy, which received its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest 2026, turns parasocial obsession into a grotesque transaction in which everyone wants something from everyone else. Celebrity power couple Sasha and Bjorg have built lives around being watched; ordinary couple Eileen and Chuck have built part of theirs around watching them. Put those four people together in an isolated luxury retreat and Starsuckers becomes an increasingly bloody experiment in what happens when the screen separating idol from admirer suddenly disappears.

Sasha, played with magnificent weaponised self-absorption by Manon Ens-Lapointe, is a wellness entrepreneur for whom apparently no emotion is too intimate to monetise. Bjorg, embodied by James Alex with the swagger of a man permanently attending the premiere of his own life, is a fading action star whose résumé includes the wonderfully ridiculous “Bat Man” movies—the joke being that this is literally a man with a bat. They have even produced a baby who is simply called Baby, parenthood seemingly functioning as another inconvenient stage in their brand strategy. One particularly inspired detail has Sasha selling her own tears online, which neatly summarises the film’s worldview: authenticity is valuable only once somebody finds the correct packaging for it. The couple invite devoted fans Eileen (Jersey Anderson) and Chuck (Jacob Stickles) to spend a weekend with them, supposedly for wellness, bonding and emotional renewal. Their luxurious lakeside hideaway is actually a rented property, naturally, because in this universe even the private life of a celebrity is essentially a set.

The weekend takes a spectacularly wrong turn almost immediately, and it would be unfair to catalogue the subsequent atrocities. Suffice to say that Belvedere, played by Steven Hobé, occupies a considerably stranger position than his initial role as driver and narrator suggests. What is particularly funny about this development is how aggressively Brett M. Butler and Jason G. Butler begin dismantling their own storytelling apparatus. Characters do not merely break the fourth wall; at times they behave as though they resent its existence. Violence, narration, performance and filmmaking itself start contaminating one another. The approach produces some of the movie’s funniest surprises, although it also exposes its principal weakness. Once Starsuckers discovers that it can rewrite its own rules, it occasionally becomes more interested in demonstrating that freedom than in sharpening the satire. There is a point at which another metafictional detour feels less like escalation than another tab opening in an already overcrowded browser.

Where the film works best is in its refusal to make Eileen and Chuck uncomplicated victims. Jersey Anderson gives Eileen an especially interesting trajectory because the character's devotion never quite behaves as expected. Horror should theoretically destroy her illusions, yet proximity to celebrity can prove intoxicating even when that celebrity is demonstrably monstrous. Jacob Stickles, meanwhile, gives Chuck a wonderfully pliable quality: he is amiable, frequently bewildered and capable of adjusting to circumstances that should send any rational human sprinting toward the nearest police station. Their behaviour is deliberately absurd, but behind the absurdity lies the film’s most persuasive idea. Parasocial relationships are not simply about believing that we know famous people; they can create an emotional investment so powerful that evidence becomes negotiable. Starsuckers understands that celebrity worship can survive humiliation, betrayal and even horror because abandoning an idol sometimes means admitting that part of your own identity was constructed around a fantasy.

Visually, the film makes a smart decision by refusing the desaturated misery commonly associated with contemporary low-budget horror. Cinematographer Mathieu Seguin gives the retreat an almost aggressively attractive appearance: bright skies, floral costumes and saturated colours clash amusingly with the increasingly appalling behaviour occurring inside the frame. The effect is appropriate for a story about people who instinctively beautify everything before presenting it to an audience. Even the gore can acquire a cartoonish quality, pushing the film toward splatter comedy rather than conventional terror. There is an interesting anecdotal connection here with the filmmakers themselves: Brett M. Butler and Jason G. Butler have described entering filmmaking from opposite directions, one studying film and writing while the other briefly pursued acting before they decided to make movies together. That DIY instinct remains visible. Starsuckers may occasionally reveal the restrictions of independent production, but it compensates with personality, commitment and a willingness to make choices considerably stranger than those found in safer genre products.

The cast understands that restraint would probably kill this material. Manon Ens-Lapointe is particularly fearless, pushing Sasha beyond familiar influencer parody into something almost predatory, while James Alex finds unexpected comic mileage in Bjorg's monumental conviction that he remains a major cultural event. Jersey Anderson gradually complicates the apparent hierarchy between worshipper and worshipped, and Jacob Stickles makes Chuck's dimness oddly endearing without turning him into a conventional innocent. That commitment matters because Starsuckers deliberately surrounds us with people whose moral compasses appear to have been replaced by engagement metrics. Nobody is especially pleasant company, but that is precisely the joke. Interestingly, when the cast were asked what imaginary FrightFest award they would create, Jersey Anderson suggested a “What Did I Just Watch?” award for films willing to take enormous swings. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate unofficial category for Starsuckers: whether a viewer embraces or rejects its excess, timidity is certainly not among its problems.

The problem is that excess eventually becomes both the movie's personality and its limitation. Influencer narcissism, celebrity worship, commodified intimacy, relationship branding, sexual power, class resentment, fandom and the mechanics of filmmaking itself all compete for attention. Some jokes are delightfully precise; others arrive carrying a metaphorical highlighter to make certain nobody misses the target. The narration is particularly symptomatic: amusing when it contributes another layer of artificiality, unnecessary when it explains that characters already written and performed as spectacular narcissists are, indeed, spectacular narcissists. A leaner screenplay might have trusted the audience more and allowed the disturbing implications of Eileen and Chuck's devotion to breathe. There is a genuinely vicious film hiding beneath the jokes—the suggestion that the influencer economy exists not simply because narcissists demand attention, but because audiences willingly manufacture the currency with which that attention is purchased.

Yet Starsuckers remains difficult to dismiss because its messiness is inseparable from its energy. Brett M. Butler and Jason G. Butler have made a film that behaves rather like the culture it attacks: noisy, shameless, brightly packaged, desperate to keep escalating and terrified that our attention might wander elsewhere. That may not always be intentional, but it makes the experience curiously appropriate. Beneath severed body parts, obscene jokes and deliberate bad taste sits a surprisingly bleak proposition: there may no longer be a meaningful distinction between exploiting an audience and volunteering to be exploited by the people we elevate. Fame in Starsuckers is not something one possesses; it is a contagious ecosystem in which celebrity and follower continually feed one another. Uneven, occasionally exhausting and not nearly as incisive as its best ideas deserve, the film nevertheless possesses something many polished satires lack—a genuinely unruly personality. In an online world obsessed with carefully curated identities, perhaps its refusal to behave itself is ultimately its most appealing feature.

Starsuckers
Written and directed by Jason Butler, Brett Butler
Produced by David Carruthers, David Daniels, Dan Lyon
Starring: James Alex, Manon Ens-Lapointe, Jersey Anderson, Jacob Stickles
Cinematography: Mathieu Seguin
Edited by Brett M. Butler, Jason G. Butler
Production companies: Substance Production
Distributed by: 
Release dates: 
Running time: 86 minutes

Viewed on August 22, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)